Inception (2010)

Warning: Mild Spoilers

I had to think about this one for awhile before I wrote about it.

Say what you want about Christopher Nolan's new epic Inception. Bloated, sure. Confusing, absolutely. Overcooked, probably. Does it all work? No.

But you can't deny the ambition behind it. It's a film that was clearly made by an intellectually curious mind genuinely trying to discover something new. For a Hollywood summer blockbuster with a budget topping out at $160 million in this age of megastupid crap like G.I. Joe and Transformers, that's damn near miraculous.

I'm not even going to try to sum up the plot, because to do so would be an act of pure futility. Most of you, if you haven't seen it, probably already know the basics: Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a Man With A Past who makes a dubious living hacking into the dreams of corporate scions and stealing information. This heist-of-the-subconscious is called "extraction." But then he's made an Offer He Can't Refuse by a Japanese energy tycoon (Ken Watanabe) and assembles a team to do the seeming impossible: hack into the dreams of the heir (Cillian Murphy) to a rival corporation and plant an idea rather than to take one. This is called, predictably enough, "inception." So Cobb hires an architect (Ellen Page) to design the dream, and a bunch of other dudes to do some other stuff. And we're off to the races.

Nifty idea, right? And kind of unworkable, when you get right down to it. In the hands of a lesser talent (say, oh, I don't know, Michael Bay), it would have been a big steaming mess. But going in I knew that if anyone could make sense of this, it would be Christopher Nolan.

Rather than try to dissect what this movie's doing or make sense of it (which, until I see it about eight more times, would be pretty much impossible), I'm just going to list what I thought worked and didn't work.

1. Dream Reality

Some critics are knocking this movie for not really pulling off the "dream logic." I think this is kind of a bullshit criticism, to be honest. Dreams are inherently impossible to capture within a narrative, filmic context. As soon as the imagery is made literal by a camera, the whole thing falls apart. The only two films I can really think of that come close to capturing the sheer insanity of what a dream actually is are Adrian Lyne's Jacob's Ladder and David Lynch's Lost Highway. All the other attempts I can think of have always felt overly schematic to me.

Nolan -- as schematic a filmmaker as has ever existed -- knows this, I think she he's not really going to try. Inception doesn't attempt to capture the chaos, absurdity, surrealism, and naked emotional force of our most powerful dreams. Rather, he presents an off-kilter constructed reality more similar to what we get in The Matrix. And this is the point. These aren't "dreams" as we're accustomed to thinking of them. They are created, by the characters and for a very specific purpose. We are given levels within levels within levels of reality, one inside the other like those Russian nesting dolls, as we descend deeper into Murphy's (and, simultaneously, DiCaprio's) subconscious.

It's no accident that the whole concept of "architecture" plays a major thematic and narrative role here, and the constant imagery of stairs and elevators reinforces this. It's not about experiencing a dream-state, but rather deconstructing the very idea of reality, time and perception, and in an analytical way. This has been Nolan's obsession (even in the Batman films) since he began making movies. Go back and rewatch Following if you disagree.

2. Story Structure

This is where Nolan really lives and breath, and in that sense the screenplay to Inception is meticulously crafted. It's not really a puzzle movie the way Memento is, but it's incredibly dense and has about a million moving parts to keep track of. It's pretty amazing how clear Nolan is able to keep everything. Unfortunately, the only way he seems to be able to do this is to resort to a nearly constant stream of exposition. But whatever. Like he himself said recently in an interview, heist films are the only types of movies where the excitement itself comes from the exposition. It's about knowing the details of how everything's supposed to work, and then seeing it all fall apart. And at it's heart, Inception really is a heist movie.

3. Character Development

I -- and many others -- have always said that this is Nolan's weakness. A Christopher Nolan film is all about the ideas, and the characters sort of exist to further those ideas. As such, they are often only half-alive. In Inception DiCaprio's main personal motivation mirrors that of Leonard (Guy Pierce) in Memento. Each man is trying to deal with the grief and the guilt of losing his wife (Jorja Fox in Memento, Marion Cotillard here). In both films, the emotional resonance of the personal tragedy is subsumed by the need to use the tragedy to propel the plot.

Personally, I'm okay with that. I give Nolan a bit of a pass here. I don't go to one of his films expecting to have my heart strings plucked. His movies are about the head and not so much about the heart.

What saves him is his ability to attract top-notch actors who manage to pull what heart they can out of the thin writing. Pierce managed to turn in a pretty devastating performance in Memento that builds slowly over the course of the film. I'm always surprised every time I watch it how affecting it actually is.

The same is true here. DiCaprio doesn't have the light touch Pierce did. He broods, Christian Bale-style, pretty much from the first frame, whereas Pierce made the more interesting choice to play laconically against Leonard's inner turmoil, thereby making the moments of intensit, where the turmoil manifests itself pop that much more. But DiCaprio brings an intensity to his best work that can be utterly gripping (see The Departed and Blood Diamond), if a little one-note. I would have preferred something a little less scowly -- less Marlon Brando and more Robert Mitchum -- but overall I'd say it mostly works.

Cotillard, in the thankless role of the dead wife who exists only in Cobb's mind, manages to be incandescent in every scene, and with very little to do. I have to admit I fell in love with her a bit myself here. It's because of her that this movie is as powerful as it is.

I also have to give a shout-out to the future Mrs. Scotty Milder, i.e. Ellen Page. I've pined for her pretty much since Juno (I know, I know. At least I didn't say Hard Candy). Her character here is pure plot, but she still provides that light touch that is so sorely missing from DiCaprio's performance. Long story short, I love her. The end.

Everyone else is uniformly strong, particularly Tom Hardy (Bronson) as the most roguishly charming of DiCaprio's fellow dream hackers. The only disappointment for me was Joseph Gordon-Levitt. He's okay, but I've become so accustomed to him being great in things like Brick and The Lookout that he underwhelmed me.

4. The Special Effects

What can I say? The Dark Knight really established Nolan as a A-list action director, and it did so with a refreshing dirth of "look at me Ma!" CGI. There's more in Inception, but Nolan wisely keeps it to a minimum. Many of the most impressive set pieces -- the fight in the rotating hallway, the van plunging into the water, the avalanche -- were done practically.

When Nolan does go for the big CGI sequence, he goes all out. We've all seen that shot of Paris folding up on itself in the trailer (which is too bad, really, because it kind of takes away from the "wow" factor when you actually see the movie). The ruined city-scape toward the end is truly mind blowing. And there's one shot involving a train (if you've seen it you know what I'm talking about) that actually made me recoil in my seat. But he uses this stuff only when he has to. Nolan has proven himself to be a real visual stylist, and he knows how to use his big bag of tools effectively and sparingly, to propel his ideas rather than simply show off.

5. The Music

I'm usually not a fan of huge crashing soundtracks. I may be the only person on earth who kind of can't stand John Williams' score for Star Wars. So I was surprised by how effective I found James Horner's work here. Once the movie really gets going the music never lets up, which normally would drive me batshit, but for some reason it actually added to the experience here. I can't really say why. I have a feeling, though, that it might irritate me on repeat viewings.

So that's my very broad take on Inception. I don't think it's the ground-breaking, awe-inspiring masterpiece that so many people claim it is. I also don't take the contrarian view that it's an overblown piece of shit (sorry Dusty). In the end, if I was to grade it, I guess I'd give it an A-, with several points added for the sheer balls it took to get it made in this environment. This is a huge summer movie that you can actually talk about once it's over. I'll give my kudos for that every time.

Top 11 songs about heartbreak

I was in Los Angeles about a week ago and I rented a car. I forgot to bring my auxiliary cable for my iPod, so until I was able to make it up from Culver City to the Radio Shack in Hollywood, I was stuck listening to LA radio.

Whoever had the car before me left it on some hip-hop/R&B station. I don't remember much about the song, but suffice it to say that it featured an Usher clone going on and on about how he wanted some girl back who he had screwed around on. The song was so syrupy, sophomoric, and overproduced as to be laughable, and it reminded me of this:

NSFW due to David Cross ass at the end, among other things


I giggled all the way up La Cienega to 3rd Street, at which point Kanye came on and I shut the radio off. But that song -- along with my earlier post about the five albums that changed my life and my newly rekindled obsession with Jim Croce -- got me thinking about hearbreak songs, and how hard they are to do well. No genre of popular music is more susceptible to cliché and unintentional hilarity.

Occasionally, however, a musician manages to find that nerve and work it like a boxer working a kidney. You try to resist, but by the end you're reduced to a blubbering mess.

So here, in no particular order, is my list of the heartbreak songs that actually kinda work:

Jim Croce - "Operator (That's Not The Way It Feels)"

I already talked at length about Croce in my last post, so I'll try to keep this short. What makes this song so effective is the specificity of the story. It's just a guy talking to a telephone operator and wanting to place a call to his ex-girlfriend. We don't know anything about their relationship, other than that she ran off with his "best old ex-friend Ray." We don't know what happened or who was at fault, so we're able to imprint our own experiences onto the back story. Meanwhile, we're just left with this guy, standing in a phone booth and trying to talk himself into making a call that, deep down, he knows he doesn't want to make. He wants to wish her well, let bygones be bygones, but he just can't do it.

"Operator, can you help me place this call? Because I can't read the number that you just gave me," he says. "There's something in my eyes, you know it happens every time."

We've all been there, in some fashion, I would guess.

In the end, he tells the operator to forget it. "You can keep the dime," he says. No lyric has ever summed up the resigned defeat that follows a nasty breakup better than that.

Johnny Cash - "If You Could Read My Mind"

Sometimes it's really not the song itself, but rather the person singing it and what their own story brings.

Just before he died, Johnny Cash recorded this cover of Gordon Lightfoot's...uh...classic from the early 1970s. The lyrics are interesting, but are the sort of abstract singer-songwriter stuff you found a lot of in that time.

But if you listen to this and remind yourself that Cash was nearly blind and bedridden when he recorded it, a broken man who was still mourning the death of his wife of 35 years, June Carter Cash...well, worlds open up.

The delicate guitar, the plaintive strain of his haggard, old man voice ... Don't tell me that when he sings "But stories always end/And if you read between the lines/You'll know that I'm just trying to undersand" he's not thinking about June and his own imminent death.

The Ramones - "The KKK Took My Baby Away"

And now for a change of pace.

This is another one where the song itself is really secondary to the back story. Anyone who knows anything about the Ramones knows that uber-leftie Joey and super-rightie Johnny really, really, REALLY hated each other. They hated each other pretty much from the start, but things only got worse after Johnny stole Joey's girlfriend. So Joey wrote this song out of revenge. And Johnny knew it. And they stayed in the band together for years afterwards.

This isn't one that's likely to make you misty eyed. But imagine these guys onstage at CBGBs doing this song and staring daggers at each other, and at the very least it should make you pretty uncomfortable.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - "Still In Love"

This is the second creepiest song that's going to be on this list (wait for the next one). It starts with a mournful, tinkling piano and a droning guitar, and then Cave comes in with this:

"The cops are hanging around the house/ Cars outside look like they've got the blues/ The moon don't know if it's day or night/ Everybody's creeping around with plastic covers on their shoes..."

Um, what?

The song goes on for awhile, and then we get to the chorus -- "you might think I'm crazy/ but I'm still in love with you" -- and that's when you realize the song is about a murder-suicide.

And then you go take a hot shower.

Moving on...

Pink Floyd - "Don't Leave Me Now"

If that last one didn't give you the shivers, this one (off of "The Wall") is bound to.

Coming after the shrieking rock-star freakout of "One Of My Turns," we find Pink (Bob Geldoff in the movie, probably Syd Barrett in real life) begging his girlfriend (or wife, maybe) not to leave him.

The music drones and drones and drones, and Roger Water' warbles lines like "Oh babe...don't leave me now...how could you go...when you know how I need you...to beat to a pulp on a Saturday night...OH BABE...WHY ARE YOU RUNNING AWAY?"

I can't think of another song that feels like a more thorough portrait of insanity. I'm guessing that Mel Gibson can relate.

Brenda Lee - "I'm Sorry"

This one is kind of hard to explain. It's definitely schmaltzy. But something about the combination of her voice, the crooning chorus behind her, and the melancholy violins just sort of plucks at my heart strings. What can I say?

I also find it interesting that it's pretty clear in the subtext that it's about how she screwed around on somebody. That seems kind of daring for a pop song of that era.

Lefty Frizzell - "Long Black Veil"

Country music offers some of the worst offenders in the cheesy/clichéd heartbreak genre. It almost seems as though a secret cabal in Nashville issued a decree sometime around 1953 that no songs would be allowed that didn't involve a cowboy crying into his beer and/or moaning about how his woman done him wrong. All other ideas are penned up and shipped off to the musical equivalent of Siberia.

But occasionally a good one kind of sneaks in under the fence and makes a break for it.

The neat trick of this one is that it's a ghost story, and the heartbreak isn't the narrator's (he's dead), but rather belongs to the woman he left behind. He looks on from up above (or from down below...he did screw his best friend's wife, after all) and relates the story with a cool, wistful detachment that somehow makes the tragedy hit home that much harder.

It's Frizzell's laconic delivery that makes the song work. I've heard covers -- even Johnny Cash's -- which play toward the melodrama rather than against it. Frizzell just gives us the facts, and in doing so he manages to craft a song that is both creepy and strangely powerful.

Charley Pride - "Does My Ring Hurt Your Finger"

Here's another one, like the Jim Croce song, where the simplicity of the story really works in this song's favor. And, like Frizzell, Pride's uninflected vocal performance gives it a weary, almost cynical edge that plays nicely against the minefield of clichés that accompanies all of these country ballads.

The National - "Sorrow"

"Sorry's my body on the waves/ Sorrow's a girl inside my cave/ I live in a city sorrow built/ It's in my honey, in my milk..."

That kind of achingly twee sentiment could have made this song go horribly awry, but when coupled with the minimalistic approach to the music and singer Matt Berninger's softly rumbling baritone, the feeling the song evokes is of the quiet hollowness that accompanies heartbreak rather than the drama of the heartbreak itself.

The central idea is summed up in the chorus -- "I don't want to get over you" -- and the music builds to just enough of a swirl around it to drive that sense of loss home, while keeping restrained and staying just a few steps shy of sentimentality.

Altogether, this is one of the most beautifully rendered sonic portraits of a man lost in the sea of his own regrets that I can remember.

The Beatles - "Rocky Raccoon"

This may seem an odd choice. I think most people look at this song as a gentle parody of the type of cheeseball country ballad I was lamenting before.

But, like the Brenda Lee song, there's just something about McCartney's voice and the simple, melancholy guitar that makes this one resonate for me in a way that even McCartney himself probably didn't intend. He pretty much drops the satire as soon as he stops aping Merle Haggard after the first few verses and slides effortlessly back into his trademark falsetto. As goofy as it is, this manages to be a weirdly affecting song about a poor kid who tries to stand up for the woman he loves and gets a bullet in the side for his trouble.

The Pogues - "Fairytale of New York"

I don't think I even need to say anything about this song. It's essentially perfect. I could listen to this, and only this, for the rest of my life and be perfectly happy.

In Memoriam: Edwin Houston Harrison, 1908-2010

Hey, guys. I hope you'll indulge me a little bit here.

My grandfather, Edwin Houston Harrison, passed away last night at the age of 102.

I kind of wanted to say a few things about him. Okay, a lot of things. This is sort of a weird venue, I guess, but it's the only one I have. So here goes.

Like most people, I imagine, I didn't really know that much about my grampa when I was a kid. He had lived several lifetimes before I was a speck on anyone's horizon. By the time I came along he was retired and motoring around the country with my grandma in their old silver pickup truck and travel trailer. The earliest memory I have of him is being up at Vallecito Lake outside of Durango, Colorado. He was talking to my brother (who was probably 13 or 14 at the time; I might have been two or three) while loading fishing poles into the back of the truck. I didn't even really know what the poles were for, but I knew it had something to do with fish and I remember being really mad because I couldn't go with them.

My grampa was the strong and silent type. Grandma was as vivacious and bubbly as could be. She talked a mile a minute, usually at top volume, and she had an infectious laugh that rolled out of her like the tide. So Grampa probably just figured he'd let her do most of the talking and keep himself to himself.

Consequently, I never really heard all that much about him or what had gone on in his life before I showed up. I knew he had been born on a farm in Oklahoma, and that his first wife had died shortly after giving birth to my Uncle Eddie in the 1930s, and that somehow he and my grandma had ended up in Los Alamos during WWII and that he had something to do with building the roads.

That was about it. To me he was just my grampa.


I don't know why I'm making that face

He was 16 years older than my grandma, so when she passed away back in 2006 I think he was more shocked than anybody. That was the first and last time I ever saw my grandpa cry. It was also, incidentally, the only time I remember him telling me that he loved me. I didn't mind. He wasn't a demonstrative guy, and I guess it had always been understood.

After Grandma died I decided I wanted to get to know Grampa a little better. So I borrowed a camera from a friend and I recorded about seven hours of interviews with him about his life.

Grampa's earliest memory, he told me, was living in a half-dugout on his parents' farm outside of Olustee, Oklahoma. His dad was a homesteader. They had 160 acres that they had to make workable ("proved up," as my grampa said) before they could own it outright. In the meantime, they lived in a one-room cabin, half dug out of the ground, with wooden planks for walls, thatch for a roof, and blankets and old newspaper for insulation.

One winter, when my grampa was about two, they had a nasty blizzard and his dad had to bring the chickens and one of their calves into the dugout so they wouldn't freeze to death. Grampa -- who was about 98 at the time he told me the story -- said he clearly remembered the icicles hanging from the calf's eyelashes.


That's him on the right.

Grampa was the oldest of nine kids (all but his youngest sister Johnny have passed away). He had the misfortune of trying to go into farming himself just as the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression hit. He married his high school sweetheart, Verna, rented a tractor and a plot of land south of Olustee, and got to work.

But it was no good.

"I made good crops down there, but you just couldn’t sell them," he told me. "I sold cotton for six cents a pound and wheat for 31 cents a bushel. That doesn’t even pay to harvest it. I had to give that up.”

in 1933 Verna gave birth to one son, Jimmy Dean, who died at birth. My uncle Eddie was born in 1936. The (possibly apocryphal) story my grandma told me when I was a kid was that two weeks after the baby was born Grampa went into town to buy her a pair of slippers. He came back to find her dead, probably of a blood clot.

I tried to ask Grampa about that when I interviewed him. He just grimaced a little and said "I don't really want to talk about that." So we moved on.

The farm went belly up, and Grampa bounced around for a long time looking for work. His family took in Eddie while he was out on the road. He started with construction in Oklahoma, mostly on roads, and before long this took him all over the Southwest doing contracts, mostly for the military, as the country geared up to enter WWII. He worked in Roswell for awhile, and El Paso, and in 1940 he found himself in Gallup building concrete "igloos" for the armory.

One day, during his lunch break, he met a pretty young waitress at the local Greek restaurant named Paula "Polly" Gonzales. She was 18. He was 34.

Grandma and Grampa both told me the story of their meeting about a year or so before she died. Unfortunately this was before I had the idea to put this stuff on film, so I don't remember all the details. The one thing I do remember was thinking that it sure sounded like he was dating someone else at the time. Grandma called this mysterious other woman his "friend".

When I pressed them on it, they just kind of gave each other a sly little look and laughed.

At any rate, they were married a few short months later on December 9, 1941, two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor.


Grandma and Grampa with my Uncle Ron


And years later

My Uncle Ron was born in Gallup. The three of them moved around for awhile, landing again in Roswell, then moving onto Hobbs, Ft. Sumter, back to Oklahoma. They were living in Albuquerque when a friend of his from his time in El Paso told him about a mysterious new government job up in a place north of Santa Fe.

There wasn't a lot of housing up in Los Alamos at the time, so Grampa went into a bank in Santa Fe and got a loan for $1,500 to buy a travel trailer. They towed it up the hill in their Buick sedan, and they lived in that trailer for several years.

Grampa was one of the first eleven civilians to work in Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. He started in the auto pool as a mechanic.

I asked him what he thought the Trinity test and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Did he have any inkling of what was brewing up there?

He didn't seem to understand the question. "Didn't think anything of it," he said. "We all just did our jobs."

Los Alamos ended up being the place where they would stay. After the war my Grandma gave birth to my mom (they were still living in the trailer at the time). They sent for Uncle Eddie, got themselves a house, and Grampa started working with the Zia Company building the roads all throughout town. He retired in 1973 as Superintendent of Roads, Labor and Mechanics.



Once retired, he and Grandma bought themselves another travel trailer and hit the road for about fifteen years or so. I came along in 1977. By then they had pretty much decided that Vallecito Lake was their favorite spot, and in the mid 1980s they sold the travel trailer, bought a mobile home in a little retirement community near the lake, and settled there permanently.

I've never talked to my brother or my cousins about this, but I would hazard a guess that my experience with my grandparents was very different from theirs. I'm the youngest. They're all sort of clumped together in age, and I was a late comer by about a decade. Grandma and Grandpa were traveling a lot when they were kids, and since there were so many of them they had to share.

By the time I wasn't still peeing my pants or eating the Play-Doh, they were pretty much settled in Colorado. I sort of had them to myself.


Yep, that's me again

I used to go up there for a few weeks every summer, either with my parents or by myself. I remember how cool it was, even in July, surrounded by all those pine trees. I remember the sound of the birds, always there, and how I used to sleep out on their covered porch and lay awake at night and watch for raccoons.

My grandma used to take me to Bingo with her once a week down at the little community center in the trailer park. I won $5 once. I think that was the happiest moment of my life up to that point.

I remember that they used to have a drag show once a year, believe it or not. I only saw it once, I think. All the old timers would borrow their wives' dresses and scarves and gloves, throw on a wig and put on stockings and rouge and ruby red lipstick, and then go strutting their stuff on the catwalk. The old ladies would hoot and holler and throw things and generally laugh themselves silly.

When my grampa came out from the back, wearing a purple dress and a long blond wig and two bright dangly clip-on earings, my eyes were the size of cookie tins and my jaw hung wide and loose like a trap door. This was my grampa, after all. A man's man through and through. I knew he was supposed to be part of the show, but I don't think I believed it until I saw it.

Grampa saw me sitting there in my grandma's lap, my face agog and full of naked wonder, and he smiled a crooked little smile that let me in on the joke. "Can you believe I'm up here in this ridiculous get up?" that smile seemed to say.

And then he tipped me a wink. I just about died of laughter.



Mostly, though, I remember the fishing.

Yep, I finally made it out there on the lake with him. By this point my brother was off at college or maybe living in Albuquerque, so it was usually just the two of us. He'd wake me up unceremoniously well before dawn. I'd groan, then smell the eggs or the toast that my grandma had made for me, pull myself out of bed, wipe the sleep from my eyes, and stumble into the kitchen to have a mostly silent breakfast with the two of them. Then my grampa would say something like "best get to it now," and my grandma would give me a thermos with hot chocolate when I was younger, coffee when I got a little older, and a plastic baggie full of her homemade chocolate chip cookies (the best I've ever had, let me tell you) and banana bread.

Then I'd pull on my shoes and trudge out after him to that old silver truck and we'd drive the couple miles or so down to the lake, neither of us talking much but Grampa occasionally singing a little bit under his breath. I'd sit next to him and yawn happily and watch as the sun started to peek its head up over the rim of the mountains.

We would get to the wharf, and Grampa would josh a little with the guys there, and one of them (usually a kid) would go out there and tow his boat back to the dock. We'd climb in, and I'd always be a little bit scared when I'd put my foot onto the bottom of the boat and feel it rock a little on the water. But Grampa always put a thick hand on my shoulder to steady me, so that was all right.

Then we'd charge out to the middle of the lake, and when he decided we were far enough out we'd let our lines out. I'd stare at the reel as the line unspooled into the water, making a soft and reassuring whir-whir-whir sound as it went. It was lead line, color coded by the number of feet. First blue, then red. When it would get to the yellow I'd thumb the catch and it would stop.

Grampa would shut off the motor and we'd sit there waiting. And waiting. And waiting. He always let me sit up at the front of the boat, so I'd lean back in my seat and put my feet up on the middle bench and just watch the line as it twitched a little, teased by a twig or maybe a slow current under the glasslike surface that I couldn't see.

After awhile, Grampa might start singing a little. I usually couldn't understand what he was saying. His Okie accent was so thick as to be almost a caricature, and whenever he sang he'd exaggerate it a little. But I loved the sound of his voice.

Sometimes we'd talk a little bit. He'd tell me about the different kinds of fish: Coconi salmon, rainbow, brown trout, the occasional pike near the shore that could cut your line with their sharp little teeth. He'd tell me how the fish got there, and how he knew what part of the lake to go to each morning to get the maximum number of bites.

Sometimes he'd tell me stories. I think it was out there on the lake when he first told me about Monkeyjack and Rawhide and Bloody Bones -- who came to snatch little boys out of their beds when they're bad -- thereby scaring the bejeezus out of me but also probably inadvertently helping spur my lifelong love of monster stories.

One day he taught me how to yodel. There was no one else out there, so there was nobody we could bother. We sat there, shouting "yodel-i-oh-i-oh" at the mountains, daring each other with each yell to be just a little bit louder...a little bit louder...and hearing our voices rocket back at us across the water. I remember thinking it was kind of like magic.

Then we'd get a bite. "Heyup!" Grampa would say, and I'd bounce up and down in my seat, full of excitement and always for the first few seconds not quite remembering what to do, and then I'd grab my pole and start to reel in. Grampa would coach me, tell me to ease up when I needed to and let that sucker think he was gonna get away, tell me when to pull and when to let him swim. I'd watch the line change from yellow to red and finally back to blue, and then the clear leader would emerge with the shiny spinning lures (Grampa called them "twizzlers"), and after that, by golly, there'd be a daggum fish!

"There it is!" I'd shout, and Grampa would grab the net and I'd try with all my might to fight that thing up to the surface. Sometimes the fish would get away. But usually not. Usually Grampa would just scoop it up and drop it to the floor of the boat, and we'd watch it flop around there for a bit before throwing it into the cooler. Then Grampa would fix my bait and fire up the engine, and we'd let the line out and do it all over again.

Let me tell you one of life's great secrets: Nothing tastes better than a fresh fish you pulled out of the water yourself.

Eventually, as the years went on, it got harder and harder for them to stay up in Colorado. The closest hospital was over in Bayfield, which was twenty minutes away. Grampa fell off the roof one winter while clearing snow and banged himself up pretty good. He wasn't seriously hurt, but I think that was what convinced him and it wasn't too long after that they decided to sell the trailer and head back to Los Alamos. My Mom and Uncle Ron bought a little house for them.

Without a lake nearby, he was pretty much done with fishing. So he took to doing work on the house instead. He was in his late 80s or early 90s when he built the back patio, mostly by himself (Uncle Ron and my cousin Kenny helped with the roof). He was losing a lot of his strength by then, so he devised a system of pulleys and levers to help lift and move things. That still blows my mind.

After the patio was done he got to work on his garden. He was in his mid 90s, I think, when he really tackled it in earnest. When we were preparing his 100th birthday party two years ago, I put together a little video slideshow to show to the guests. The only picture he cared about was this one:


That's the patio he built

When my Grandma died, it was a shock to all of us. She had been in great health, still walked a mile every day, and seemed to be bouncing back nicely after surgery on her knee.

This is the story that I remember hearing. I might not have all the details right, but I think I got the gyst.

Early one morning, while it was still dark, Grandma woke complaining of a strange pain and a feeling of heat in her shoulders. She and Grampa discussed what they should do, whether they should call the ambulance or maybe call my Mom to take her to the hospital. But they decided they didn't want to bother anyone. Grandma drank a ginger ale, thinking that would make her feel better, and they went back to bed.

When my Grampa woke up later, Grandma was in the bathroom. Grampa went into the kitchen, fixed himself something to eat, and talked to my Uncle Ron (who was by then living in St. George, Utah) on the phone for a bit. After getting off the phone it occurred to him that Grandma had been in the bathroom for an awful long time.

He went to check on her and found her slumped against the door, blocking it so that he couldn't get it open.

He called my mom, said something to the effect of: "Your mama fell down in the bathroom and I think she's dead."

I was interning at LionsGate in Los Angeles at the time. My dad called me and told me what happened, that my Grandma Polly had passed away. It sounded like a heart attack. This didn't seem possible; before I left two months earlier she had seemed as bubbly and vivacious as ever. I immediately booked a flight home.

When I made it up to my grandparents' house the whole family was there. Grampa came into the living room from kitchen, tottering on his increasingly unstable legs. His eyes and cheeks were wet with tears.

"How're you doing, Grampa?" I asked. I had no idea what else to say.

"Not too good, Scott," he said, and he grasped my hand and squeezed as hard as he could. His voice was thick and shaky. "Not too good at all."

We sat there for awhile, all of us, numb, not talking about much in particular.

Finally, as I was getting ready to go, I went to him and put my arms around him and kissed him on the forehead. "Bye, Grampa," I said.

"Bye, Scott," he said. Then: "I love you."

After Grandma was gone, the burden of caring for him for the next few years fell mostly to my mother and my cousin Kenny. Grampa insisted on staying in his house and -- for a guy edging out of his 90s -- did remarkably well for himself. But he was getting weak, and none of us trusted his legs.

Eventually Kenny moved in with him and helped care for him. I have to say, I think my cousin acquitted himself heroically. I don't know if I could have done it.

Grampa continued to get weaker and weaker, and before long he wasn't able to do much with his garden. So he mostly sat and watched sports (on mute, because he didn't give a wit what the announcers had to say, he could follow it just fine, thank you very much), did his crosswords, and listened to his religious shows on the radio. It was during this time I got it in my head to interview him on camera.

Finally, about a year ago, he went to live with my aunt and uncle in Utah. Kenny was preparing to get married, and it was getting too hard for my mom to be there all the time without living with him.

After Grampa left, I didn't talk to him much. He was almost impossible to understand on the phone, for one thing. But, to be honest, I just didn't really know what to say.


Grampa with my mom on his 102nd birthday in Utah

About a month ago he developed pneumonia. He had had a lot of trouble breathing for years, and at his age the strain was just too much. His throat was full of phlegm and he could hardly swallow, so it became next to impossible for him to eat. My mom told me about the only thing he could keep down was one bottle of Ensure a day.

My mom and I talked to him on the phone this past Sunday.

"How're you doing, Grampa?" I asked.

"Not too good, Scott," was the reply.

As always, it was hard to understand him. But we talked for a bit, and he was delighted to hear that I got a job teaching. He wished me luck.

"Take care of yourself, Grampa," I said when we signed off. I didn't understand what he said in return.

That was the last time I talked to him.

It was only later that I realized what I forgot to say. So I'm going to say it now.

I love you, Grampa.

I hope you're well wherever you are, and that there are plenty of fish to catch and flowers to tend to.

I love you.

And I miss you.

Goodbye.

Quicktake Book Review: "Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk" by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain (1997)

In the mid 1970s, future Spin Magazine editor Legs McNeil was just a burnout kid from the outer boroughs of New York City who -- with friends John Holmstrom and Ged Dunn -- put together a fanzine so they could hang out with their favorite band, The Dictators.

The fanzine was called Punk Magazine. It became a cultural touchstone and (if McNeil himself is to be believed) gave a name to an underground culture and music movement that was just starting to bubble up as a reaction against hippies, disco, and the growth of stadium rock.

More than 20 years later, McNeil put together this book, which is a collection of interviews with everyone from Lou Reed (The Velvet Underground), Iggy Pop (The Stooges), Wayne Kramer (the MC5), Patti Smith, and about a million others, going back to the early 1960s and narrating the chaotic rise of a movement that -- like all movements -- wasn't really a movement at all. These kids had no idea what they were doing or where any of this would lead. For them it was all about sex, drugs, puking, sleeping in gutters, hustling at Times Square, taking more drugs, talking shit about each other, getting stabbed by their girlfriends, puking some more, and occasionally playing some music.

McNeil doesn't contextualize very much, and he doesn't try to make this book comprehensive. He just lets the people involved speak for themselves. This is about how punk rock was born, and -- with the exception of a few epilogues toward the end telling us where some of these characters would end up (most of them not well) -- the narrative pretty much stops at the 1980s. We don't hear anything about Southern California hardcore, post-punk, emo, or any of the offshoots that sprung out of the original scene. The Dead Kennedys aren't even mentioned, much less Green Day.

But, like McNeil's subsequent oral history The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry, Please Kill Me provides a fascinating and unvarnished look at the details that made up the movement, such as it was. McNeil and McCain wisely narrow their focus to a few pertinent characters: primarily Pop, Kramer, Smith, Dee Dee Ramone, and Johnny Thunders from the New York Dolls. But they include snippets of interviews from literally hundreds of people (I really appreciated the appendix at the end listing all the participants), and in so doing manags to create an almost anthropological study in how a subculture like this comes to be. It's fascinating to see how disparate the influences were -- hot rod racing in Detroit, Warhol's Factory, the gay underground in New York City, just to name a few -- and how, over the course of years, it all coalesced into something that was, while not entirely cohesive, certainly a musical and cultural a paradigm shift.

And we get great stories on such topics as the birth of CBGBs, Malcolm McLaren's disastrous stint as the Dolls' manager, Handsome Dick Manitoba's feud with Wayne County, the squalid and doomed romance between Nancy Spungen and Syd Vicious, and much more.

And, yes, there's lots of sex, drugs, blood and vomit.

Highly recommended.

The 5 albums that changed my life

Partly inspired by Dusty's excellent and always entertaining Playground of Doom blog -- as well as my own realization that I just don't care as much about talking about movies as I did when I started this thing a year ago -- I've decided to retool "Blood Has Been Shed Jerry" into a general all-purpose review and pop-culture blog.

The fact is these days I've been reading books and listening to music -- and following the trials and tribulations of one Ms. Lindsay Lohan and one Mr. Mel Gibson -- way more than I've been watching movies.

So, in that spirit, here's my first music blog.

Every one of us has four or five albums that affected us so thoroughly when we first encountered them that they've become infused into our DNA. These albums may be undisputed masterpieces. There are plenty of people of my parents' generation who would point to The Beatles "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" or Dylan's "Blood on the Tracks" as the records that define that era for them, and no one would argue.

But sometimes these are just records that found us at the right time and, regardless of quality or critical consensus, managed to find some soft spot in our souls to poke at. Maybe they got us through a breakup, or helped us get our sea legs at a new job, or defined one wild and crazy summer. We could be talking about (in the case of one ex-girlfriend of mine) Abba's "Greatest Hits." Or Metallica's "Master of Puppets." Or maybe the soundtrack from West Side Story. Doesn't matter. We cling to these records like they're a ratty old stuffed animal or a poop-stained security blanket, and it doesn't matter to us that Rolling Stone only gave them two stars.

This list is probably a combination of both masterpieces and security blankets. I'll let you decide which are which.

Here are the Five Albums That Changed My Life, ranked chronologically by when I discovered them.

1. Pink Floyd - "The Wall" (1979)

This is it, the big daddy, the one that looms above all others for me. Nothing has ever come close.

First, a bit of context. This has been my favorite album for over 25 years. That's only impressive when you realize that I'm 32 and you do the math.

That's right: I was rocking out to "Comfortably Numb" and running around jumping on the couch and screaming "WE DON'T NEED NO EDUCATION" when I was six. That's what happens when your brother is 12 years older than you.



I got my first Walkman cassete player when my parents and I road-tripped the country one summer around when I was in the first grade, and the first three tapes I had were Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Green River" (just missed this list by a nose), some greatest hits collection by Chuck Berry ... and "The Wall." These tapes were my introduction to the very concept of rock and roll. The first two were purchased at the same Walgreens or whatever where my dad got me the Walkman (presumably to shut me up in the back of the car).

The third came from my brother some time after we got back, recorded off his scratchy double LP and wrapped up as (I think) a Christmas present.

To this day, I can't really say what it is about this record that shook me so thoroughly. I've explored Floyd's catalogue backward and forward in the years since, and I can very articulately (and pretentiously) deconstruct "Dark Side of the Moon" for you, go on and on about its varied sonic landscape and its obsessions with mortality and insanity. I can tear into "Wish You Were Here" and blather about how it's a mournful meditation on fame and (yep) insanity. I can talk about poor lost Syd Barret and the shadow his acid-fueled meltdown cast over the rest of the band. I can talk about Roger Waters and his daddy issues. I can tell you exactly why I think David Gilmour is a better guitarist than Clapton.

I could also bore the piss out of you by going through this record song-by-song and telling you everything I think you need to know about it. Did you know "The Trial" wasn't Roger Waters' idea, but rather a last-minute suggestion by producer Bob Ezrin? Oh, you don't care? Sorry. I'll stop here. Just listen to it, and then try to tell me that when Roger Waters shrieks about worms eating his brain in "Hey You" or when Gilmour tells you (in the voice of the psychotic Pink) to wish "our colored cousins" a safe trip back to Africa in "Waiting for the Worms" that the hair on the back of your neck doesn't stand up.

I love many, many Pink Floyd albums ... but it still all boils down to "The Wall" for me. This is probably in no small part simply because it was the first, and a gift from my brother, who when I was six was infinitely more badass than anyone else I knew. But he also gave me The Scorpions "Blackout" and Dire Straits' "Money For Nothing," and I'm not going to sit here and tout those as a life changers. "The Wall" has stuck with me through the years and through all my different phases (the jazz phase in the eighth grade, the death-metal phase in college, the alt country phase from two or three years ago). It won't let me go.

The emotional core to the album is distilled in Roger Waters' scream that immediately preceeds the "we don't need no education" refrain from "Another Brick in the Wall (Part II). There's something about it that just cuts into me like a blade.

For a band so often dismissed as space rock, there's an open-wound, primal howl quality to "The Wall" that was (and is) unlike anything I'd ever encountered before. It's both deeply personal and acidly political. It's theatrical as well as introspective. It's about rage. And pain. And, yes, insanity. It's not Elvis being a hound dog, The Beatles wanting to hold your hand, or Bill Haley rocking around the clock. It's not even the Sex Pistols sneering about the Queen.

Forgot the smelly stoners and the laser shows at the casinos. This is rock and roll reconstituted as a bloodletting.

I love it. Twenty five years later and I still can't get enough.


Bob Hoskins rules

2. Jim Croce - "Photographs & Memories: His Greatest Hits" (199-?)

I imagine all of you out there, eyes wide and shaking your head and going "WHAAA?" But before you judge, listen to this:



Now tell me that isn't the prettiest goddamn thing you've ever heard. And if a lump doesn't rise in your throat when Jim tells the operator that "you can keep the dime," I'm sorry to tell you that your heart is nothing but a shriveled prune hanging limp and useless in the dank black cave of your chest.

Still not convinced? Try this one:



If that didn't bring a tear to your eye than there's nothing I can do for you. Go torture a puppy or whatever else it is you do for fun.

Croce was one of those sort-of folkie early 70s singer-songwriters like Harry Nilsson, Cat Stevens and Harry Chapin. He was born in South Philly, rocked possibly the world's single greatest mustache and had himself a pretty solid little career there for a few years. And then he died in a plane crash in 1973.

There wasn't much that set him apart from the singer-songwriter pack beyond the fact that he was just better than the rest of them. Most of you, if you've heard of him at all, probably know the humorous uptempo slices of urban life like "Bad Bad Leroy Brown" and "You Don't Mess Around With Jim." Good stuff, sure. But for me he really only came to life with his heartbreak ballads. He was an excellent singer with a warm, lived-in voice and an instinctual sense of melody that could pluck emotion from your heart with the precision of a surgeon's fingers.

This stuff borders on schmaltz, to be sure. But there was something so genuine, so unironic, about him that, whenever I hear a song like "Operator" or "Lover's Cross," I simply believe him in a way that I don't with almost any other singer-songwriter from the era.

As far as the album itself goes, it was just one of those cheapo compilations that my dad bought one day at Price Club back when I was in middle school. He played it when we got home, and I fell in love with it and pretty much stole it from him after the first listen (this was the era of Nirvana and New Kids on the Block. The fact that THIS was my favorite CD for about three years should tell you everything you need to know about my social standing in those days).

I even remember the track list:

1. Bad Bad Leroy Brown
2. Operator (That's Not The Way It Feels)
3. Photographs & Memories
4. Rapid Roy (The Stock Car Boy)
5. Time In A Bottle
6. New York's Not My Home
7. Workin' At The Car Wash Blues
8. I Got A Name
9. I'll Have To Say I Love You In A Song
10. Lover's Cross
11. One Less Set Of Footsteps
12. These Dreams
13. Roller Derby Queen

Eventually I made it to college, got a lip piercing and dyed my hair black and started listening to extreme European death metal. I went to about a million shows by bands like Cephalic Carnage, Broken Hope, Wicked Innocence, and Macabre. I got punched in the throat, punched another guy in the throat, had a fat guy fall on my knee and bend it backwards, watched a dwarf throw a metal folding chair across the mosh pit and knock a guy out. I was (excuse me while I puff myself up for a moment) a hardcore motherfucker.


Yep

But late at night, by myself, I would lay in my dorm and put my headphones on and go to sleep to Jim Croce.

Sometimes I still do.


If you don't like this you're probably a Stalinist

3. Korn - "Korn" (1994)

Back in 1995 I was in Rare Bear Records in Santa Fe picking through the used CDs when I came across the album you see above.

This was well before "A.D.I.D.A.S.," "Freak on a Leash," the lame-ass duets with Fred Durst and The Pharcyde, the "nü metal" label, the hip-hop pretensions and posturing, the Family Values stadium tours, and the constant MTV/TRL rotation. Korn had not yet become the cartoon godfathers of one of the lamest movements in popular music that we've ever had the misfortune to suffer through. They had yet to give birth to (shudder) Staind, (shiver) Papa Roach, and (vomit) Crazy Town. They were next to unknown. There were no band photos that I recall in the album booklet. Radio and MTV was having nothing to do with them (I later heard rumors that the "Blind" video showed up on Headbangers Ball a few times, but I never saw it).


I so wanted to look like Munky when I was 17

The CD was priced $5.99 and I thought that creepy-ass photo was pretty cool, so I bought it. I didn't get to listen to it until I got home (CD players in cars were still a novelty back then), and by the time I'd made the drive I forgot all about it. Then, a week or so later while cleaning off my desk after school, I found it in the pile and threw it into my CD player, not really expecting much.

It's hard for me to admit, knowing what we all know now about where this would ultimately lead ("I did it all for the NOOKIE, the NOOKIE..." seriously, Fred, fuck you), how powerful that first spin was. When coming up with this list I knew I needed to pick at least one metal album and I was really tempted to go with Faith No More's "Angel Dust," which was my favorite CD from a much better band. But if I'm to be truthful, nothing I stumbled across in high school came close to this album's ability to inflict pure blunt-force emotional trauma.

I remember sitting there on the edge of my bed with my eyes wide and my jaw hanging open as Jonathan Davis shredded his vocal chords and tore his heart out and (metaphorically ... I think) cut his wrists open and bled pus all over my virgin eardrums. It was like listening to the musical equivalent of bowel cancer ... and I mean that in the best possible way. Remember, this was still the grunge era, Green Day was just hitting the big time, Kurt Cobain had just eaten his shotgun, and Eddie Vedder and Trent Reznor were the closest we came to having bonafide tortured artists to look up to. So "Korn" was a total revelation. I didn't realize music could be so ferocious, so ugly, and yet so nakedly vulnerable at the same time.

When, on the bullied-kid memoir "Faget", Davis screams "I'm a FAGGOT/I'm a FAGGOT/I'm NOT a FAGGOT/You motherfucking QUEERS", my head spun around like Linda Blair's in The Exorcist.


Jeez

This wasn't macho, homophobic posturing and it wasn't pouty, Cure-style moping. This wan't Trent suffering beautifully in Sharon Tate's Hollywood Hills mansion. This was a guy in real pain, possessed by an all-consuming rage that seemed to bubble up like magma from the furnace of his soul. His voice was a howl from the abyss. He sounded like a dog being fed through a wood chipper.

And -- like millions of high school kids discovering The Who or The Stooges or Black Sabbath or Hüsker Dü or Nine Inch Nails or (these days probably) Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance for the first time -- I was overwhelmed by the feeling that "this guy gets me."

Keep in mind that I was really just a sort of tubby, somewhat socially awkward kid with a mullet and a good family. The perspective of years has made me see that, even if he got me, I certainly didn't get him. I had no idea what pain really was ... certainly not the kind of pain he was screaming about. But there was a rawness and a truthfulness to the record that rattled me way down in my bones. When you're 17 and looking for someone to put a form to whatever weird tornado you have going on inside you, that shit matters.

"Korn" introduced me to the possibilities of what heavy music could do. It didn't have to be a bunch of posing tough-guy bullshit. It could be an open wound. I imagine that what I felt the first time I listened to the CD was a little bit of what Johnny Ramone must have felt when he discovered The Stooges' "Raw Power."

I'm in my thirties now, and I still listen to this album occasionally, once every two or three years maybe. It's hard to plug back into what it meant to me when I was that pissed-off misfit kid. I can still enjoy it, sort of, in a pure nostalgia sort of way. But Korn lost me with their follow-up, "Life Is Peachy," which felt like a pale attempt to recreate the first album, and by the time they got to the sad joke that was "Follow the Leader" I was pretty much over them.

But I remember that first spin. The moment was fleeting, sure. But it was real.

4. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - "No More Shall We Part" (2001)

My first encounter with Nick Cave was Metallica's cover of "Loverman" on the "Garage Inc." album. I loved it, so I ran out and bought the Bad Seeds' "Let Love In" (1994) and "Murder Ballads" (1996). And I found myself a new hero.

These two albums are pretty spectacular. They're melodic but harsh, rooted in both blues and punk rock, and Cave displays a singularly dark lyrical sensibility that I -- coming off of my years as a death metal fan -- plugged into right away.

These albums, to me, were more punk than punk, more death rock than Cannibal Corpse could ever be. They reconstituted the whole idea of goth and made The Cure and Joy Division completely irrelevant.

So at first I wasn't entirely sure what to make of "No More Shall We Part." Gone, it seems, was the snarling provocateur who delivered such classic lyrics as "I'm a bad motherfucker don't you know/ But I'll crawl over fifty good pussies to get to one fat boy's asshole" (from "Stagger Lee" off of "Murder Ballads").


Heh

Nope. That Nick Cave seemed to have departed. Now he was crooning stuff like this:



I hadn't yet heard this album's predecessor, "The Boatman's Call" (1997), which was his follow-up to "Murder Ballads." "Boatman's Call" and "No More Shall We Part" are transitional records. Cave had (mostly) kicked his heroin habit and had his poor heart broken by P.J. Harvey. These were records made by a broken man trying to rediscover himself.

Therein lies the brilliance. Cave -- always a shameless raider of classic Americana -- found his solace this time in gospel, and even though there's nothing I would call overtly "Christian" about this record, he does tap into a spiritual depth that was largely lacking from his early work. "No More Shall We Part" is at once introspective and soaring, ruminative and anthemic.


Indeed

After the dirge-like "Boatman's Call," Cave also managed to find some joy in the music again, and he buckled down and tackled his songs with a discipline he'd never shown before. As sad as it is, there's something truly wondrous and minimal about a song like "The Sorrowful Wife." When the guitar crashes in halfway through, my breath never fails to catch in my throat.

He even regained a little of his swagger on songs like "15 Feet of Pure White Snow."


Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Fifteen Feet Of Pure White Snow
Uploaded by EMI_Music. - Music videos, artist interviews, concerts and more.
I've had nightmares that looked like this video

It took me a while to really "get" this album. But when I did it grabbed me by the nuts and shook me around like a pitbull. Finally I saw Cave as not merely a provocateur, but as a bonafide poet.

He opened my eyes to whole genres of music I had never really been interested in before. Classic country, Southern gospel and blues, Irish folk ... Cave drew from all of it and crafted a record that is, to me, nearly perfect from start to finish.

5. The National - "High Violet" (2010)

Sometimes an album itself is not life changing, but rather the soundtrack to change. Maybe you're breaking up with someone, or recovering from an illness, or reading a book that stirs your soul, or experiencing a renewed burst of creative energy. Or, in my case, maybe it's all of the above.

Whatever the event or events may be, if you happen to be listening to something new at the time, it can imprint itself upon the experience and become so intertwined with it as to be completely indistinguishable.

These are the records that get you through the shit you need to get through. They may not open your mind exactly, but they give you what you need when you need it.

The life changers, the "Sergeant Peppers" and the "Blood on the Tracks," are your teachers.

These records are your friends.

Such is the case for The National's "High Violet" for me. I hadn't even heard of these guys until maybe three months ago. The review in Rolling Stone sounded kind of interesting. Inspired by both Joy Division and Bruce Springsteen? Shit, I thought, I gotta check that out.

So it's kind of hard to say whether or not my love for this record is really based on merit. But whatever. This is the best record I've come across in nearly a decade. And I'll be damned if they don't sound like Springsteen crossed with Joy Division.

A five-piece from Cincinatti now based in Brooklyn, The National is fronted by a guy named Matt Berninger who, if I remember correctly, was something like an investment banker or a stock broker who pretty much joined the band on a lark.


My new man crush. I could stare into those eyes for days...

Something about Berninger's voice haunts me in a way that I can't say I've ever really experienced before. It's like Nick Cave's, only dipped in honey and lined with velvet. There's an easy casualness to his singing style -- like a guy mumbling over a cup of coffee just after crawling out of bed -- that somehow makes it so much more affecting.

And, lyrically, he's able to grab onto an image or phrase and toss it off in a way that makes it sink in like little droplets of absinthe. "I was carried to Ohio in a swarm of bees," he sings on "Blood Buzz Ohio." I have no idea what the hell that means, but I'll be damned if it doesn't stir something.

And when he croons "I don't want to get over you" in "Sorrow" .. yeah, I get that. As, strangely, I do when he says "I was afraid I'd eat your brains, because I am evil" on "Conversation 16." That's the singularly weirdest lyric on an album full of singularly weird lyrics. But he sort of throws it out there and moves on, leaving you to shake your head and wonder if you really heard it. And the more you listen it, the more you nod and say "yep. Been there."

Musically, I wouldn't say The National pave any new ground. But the melodies match Berninger's voice perfectly, creating something rich and dark that simmers with a barely restrained heat like a pot just coming to boil.

I've so far avoided diving into The National's back catalogue because I know that there's no way the older albums will hit home like this one did. Only the upcoming years will tell if "High Violet" sticks with me the way the others on this list have. I mean, there was a time, between the ages of 10 and 11, when I truly believed that Queensryche's "Operation: Mindcrime" totally was the story of my life thus far. So who knows how I'll feel in a decade?

But I know that when I look back on this time, Berninger's voice will be what I remember.

Honorable mentions (in no particular order)

Led Zeppelin - "IV"
David Bowie - "Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars"
Metallica - "Master of Puppets"
Faith No More - "Angel Dust"
Massive Attack - "Mezzanine"
Creedence Clearwater Revival - "Green River"
Johnny Cash - "Live at Folsom Prison"
Tool - "Undertow"
The Beatles - "White Album"
Leonard Cohen - "Greatest Hits"

Splice (2010)

Warning: mild spoilers ahead

Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum): I think you're making a mistake. I think you really want to talk to me.
Ronnie (Geena Davis): Sorry, I have three other interviews to do before this party's over.
Seth: Yeah, but they're not working on something that'll change the world as we know it.
Ronnie: They say they are.
Seth: Yeah, but they're lying. I'm not.

With these words, David Cronenberg let us know exactly what his seminal remake of The Fly (1986) was all about. Seth Brundle was a twitchy New York hipster living in one of those lofts usually reserved for artists and junkie musicians, a bit intense and somewhat asocial but no more so than your average Silverlake barhopper, who thought he could rewrite the laws of physics just because he wanted to. 1980s yuppie hubris taken to the nth degree. Needless to say, it did not end well for him.

Splice, the new movie from Cube (1997) director Vincenzo Natali, really wants to be The Fly. I mean really, really, REALLY. And in Sarah Polley and Adrian Brody, Natali has not one but TWO twitchy hipster scientists with rock star egos. Their Elsa and Clive (classic horror fans, feel free to groan at the hamfisted reference) have turned gene splicing into a Barnum and Bailey circus, and they're chomping at the bit to take the next step and begin working with human DNA.

Where Cronenberg and Goldblum managed to infuse Brundle with an intensity and an animal reservoir of anger that made his subsequent transformation into "Brundlefly" seem as much a spiritual metaphor as a piece of science fiction, we're supposed to know that Elsa and Clive are rebels because they have emo haircuts and a penchant for plaid suits and rose-colored sunglasses (one of the best unintentionally hilarious moments comes when we meet Clive's brother, who looks nothing like him except for the identical My Chemical Romance-lite mop).

These people are ROCKERS (Clive listens to some truly awful heavy metal in his car). They don't got no use for authority, man. So when their corporate overlords forbid them from making a human/animal hybrid, they go ahead and do it anyway...and to an A-Team style montage backed by the most boring electronica soundtrack since Spawn no less.

I'll go ahead and say it now: Splice is an absolutely terrible movie. It takes itself way too seriously, has dialogue that sounds like it was written by a third-grader, has two of the most annoying central performances in recent memory (yes, even more annoying than Get Him To The Greek), and nothing any of the characters does makes any goddamned sense whatsoever.

But, until it takes a gratuitously ugly turn in the last ten minutes or so, it's also pretty frickin' hilarious. When one of the characters actually utters the line "I don't know who you are anymore!" after catching another character having all sorts of dirty nasty animal/human hybrid sex on the floor of a barn, the audience I saw it with was rolling in the aisles.

The only character who has even a hint of substance is the hybrid herself, DREN (Delphine Chanéac). In her own weird way, she's kind of endearing, and there are one or two moments that are actually sort of maybe a little scary. There's a kernal of an interesting idea here, buried behind the piss poor execution. Oh well.

I can't really recommend this movie at all. Just rewatch The Fly instead. But if you feel like getting really wasted and going to laugh at a movie at the dollar theater, I guess you could do a lot worse.

Book review: "The Passage" by Justin Cronin (2010)

Warning: Mild Spoilers Ahead

I know this is meant to be a movie review blog, but I've decided to break from my usual format and talk about a book. This is for two reasons:

One: Most of the movies I've seen recently have just kind of sucked. And not sucked in the way that would be fun to write about. Get Him To The Greek? Meh. It's hard to muster the energy. Even films that I enjoyed, like MacGruber, just don't seem to warrant a lot of discussion. I know I sort of scraped the bottom of the barrel with my Date Night review, so I didn't want to put you guys through that again.

Two: Justin Cronin's new novel The Passage is one of the most incredible books I've ever read.

Anyone who has ever heard me talk for more than five minutes probably knows that Stephen King's The Stand is my favorite novel of all time, and that I treat it nearly as a religion. It looms over its next closest competitor, Thomas M. Disch's equally apocalyptic The M.D. like the Sears Tower over the surrounding Chicago skyline. What makes both of these novels so great -- beyond the artfulness of the writing, the breadth of the characters, and the expansiveness of the authors' respective visions -- is the fact that both King and Disch used the basics of a horror story setup as a springboard to tell a much larger story, as a means to an end rather than an end unto itself.

To reduce either of these books to the label of "horror" is sort of like saying The White Album is a pretty good rock-and-roll record.

As someone who's been reading horror fiction seriously for more than two decades, I've never come across another novel that even approaches either of these masterpieces. So you'll understand how disconcerting it was for me when, about halfway through, I realized that The Passage might not just come close, but could actually sprint right on past like that South African runner whom everyone thinks is really a dude. In the end, it didn't. Not quite. But it sure made a race out of it.

To sum this thing up in a couple paragraphs would be a grave injustice to what Cronin has done here. Like any fantasy story, the plot -- when boiled down to its barest elements -- can't help but sound kind of goofy. So take this synopsis for what it is.

The story starts in the very near future (it's never exactly said when, but I'm guessing around 2018) with Amy Harper Bellafonte, the six-year-old daughter of a homeless prostitute named Jeanette. Once upon a time Jeanette was a waitress at a roadside diner in Iowa who fell for the dubious charms of a traveling salesman. He's described thusly:


"Amy’s father was a man who came in one day to the restaurant where Jeanette had waited tables since she turned sixteen, a diner everyone called the Box, because it looked like one: like a big chrome shoe box sitting off the county road, backed by fields of corn and beans, nothing else around for miles except a self-serve car wash, the kind where you had to put coins into the machine and do all the work yourself. The man, whose name was Bill Reynolds, sold combines and harvesters, big things like that, and he was a sweet talker who told Jeanette as she poured his coffee and then later, again and again, how pretty she was, how he liked her coal-black hair and hazel eyes and slender wrists, said it all in a way that sounded like he meant it, not the way boys in school had, as if the words were just something that needed to get said along the way to her letting them do as they liked. He had a big car, a new Pontiac, with a dashboard that glowed like a spaceship and leather seats creamy as butter. She could have loved that man, she thought, really and truly loved him. But he stayed in town only a few days, and then went on his way. When she told her father what had happened, he said he wanted to go looking for him, make him live up to his responsibilities. But what Jeanette knew and didn’t say was that Bill Reynolds was married, a married man; he had a family in Lincoln, all the way clean over in Nebraska. He’d even showed her the pictures in his wallet of his kids, two little boys in baseball uniforms, Bobby and Billy. So no matter how many times her father asked who the man was that had done this to her, she didn’t say. She didn’t even tell him the man’s name."


This is right on the first page. There's nary a vampire in sight.

What this should tell you is that Cronin's a real writer, possessing an artful grasp of language and a deft touch with the little details (“leather seats like creamy butter”) that make the characters, the environment, and the situation come alive on the page. I love horror fiction, but you just don't find writing like this that often.

Six years later, Jeanette's on the skids (Cronin very sensitively walks us through how a basically good person can end up in such desperate straits after a series of bad but understandable choices). Following a terrible night that ends with Jeanette killing one of her johns in self defense, she throws in the towel on even trying to be a mother, has Amy pack up her things in her battered Powerpuff Girls backpack, and drops her off at a Memphis convent before hitting the road.

Meanwhile, an FBI special agent named Wolgast has been traversing the country, gathering up death row inmates and spiriting them away to a top secret military compound high in the Colorado mountains, where a mad virologist named Jonah Lear and a shady special ops agent named Richards are working on an experiment dubbed Project NOAH. On an expedition into the darkest heart of the Bolivian jungle, Lear discovered a virus that reactivates the dormant thalmus gland, possibly unlocking the key to eternal life. The inmates are to be used as human guinea pigs, and they (known, somewhat religiously, as the Twelve) are transformed into a cadre of super strong vampiric mutants that glow in the dark and can rip rabbits (or humans) apart with their razor sharp teeth.

Lear requests a child -- preferably an orphan -- for the next phase of his experiment. Wolgast retrieves Amy from the convent, but can’t bring herself to take her to the compound. They hit the road. Richards mobilizes his thugs to find them. Long story short, Wolgast is thrown in a cell, Amy is injected with the virus, the Twelve mount a bloody escape, and the world comes crashing to an end.

Ninety-two years later, what may be the last remnants of the uninfected human population have established a small, straggly colony in the mountains east of Los Angeles. Their existence is brutal, and they survive only through vigilance, ingenuity, and the use of century-old military technology that keeps the huge floodlights lit at night and the creatures (called variously virals, smokes, or dracs) at bay.

One day a girl, maybe 16 and strangely impervious to injury or illness, wanders into the colony. She’s the first "Walker" anyone has seen in years. She has a microchip and radio beacon buried in her neck. The information on the microchip suggests that she's at least a century old.

The beacon leads to a repeating signal somewhere in the Colorado mountains: "If you find her, bring her here."

Thus sets the stage for an an epic, cross-country quest every bit as gripping and terrifying as Frodo's journey across Mordor.

Cronin is a pedigreed literary novelist (he has the awards, the job in academia, and the low book sales to prove it), and his dive into genre waters has brought with it considerable hype. Anyone who has followed the press knows the (too cute by half) story of The Passage’s birth: Cronin's 9-year-old daughter expressed her concern to him that his previous books weren't "interesting enough," and requested that he write something about a little girl who saves the world. Indulging her as she tagged along with him on his daily jogs, he played a "Design-a-Novel" game with her, shooting ideas back and forth and building out the story from the ground up. When winter fell and the jogs stopped, he realized he had something.

"Everything a man does in his life he does in some ways to impress a girl," he said in an interview, "and she was the girl I wanted to impress."

Gag. Like I said, too cute by half. But whatever. What matters is that Cronin has brought his considerable literary talents to bare here, building a world that feels fully realized and characters that exist with all the depth, complexity, and contradictions of real people. The Passage reads like a horror novel written by a guy who doesn't really know the genre. This could have lead to something woefully pretentious and even insulting to horror fans, but in Cronin's hands it becomes one of the book's greatest strengths. Characters like Wolgast, Sister Lacey at the convent, and Amy herself could have easily slipped into stock archetypes, but Cronin finds their humanity and draws it forth from the pages like a dowser drawing water from rocky soil.

The first third of the novel concerns the setup that leads to disaster, and Cronin wisely takes his time with it, establishing a world much like ours but just a few years more corrupt. The U.S. continues to be mired in neverending wars. The government has limited interstate travel and has turned the country into a vast surveillance state. Most disturbingly -- considering what's going on right now -- New Orleans has been depopulated and declared a Federal Petrochemical Zone (the only thing still in operation there are the oil wells) and the Gulf of Mexico has become an acrid waste.

Wolgast is a cog in this corrupt machine, diligently doing his job and trying to forget the dead child and angry ex wife he has left behind. But when he is told to bring Amy in, the last sliver of his humanity rebels. The bond that grows between the bitter agent and the little girl in his custody is truly touching without being sappy and leads – many pages later -- to a heartbreaking conclusion.

Cronin also wisely ellipses the time between the escape of the Twelve and the grim future that lies a century hence. He gives us snippets of our world's collapse (the infection spreading like cancer outward from Colorado, the military bombing the cities in an attempt to contain the virus, California and Texas seceding from the country in a last-ditch bid to defend themselves), but he doesn't dwell on it. This is a smart move, because anything he came up with would have been a tired retread of what King did in The Stand 30 years ago.

Instead, he gives us Auntie Jaxon, an old woman who was a little girl at the time of the collapse, and her reminiscences of being shuttled across the country in a train full of children to the hastily constructed compound that becomes the First Colony. There's something endearing about Cronin's notion of a group of largely abandoned children somehow providing the seeds of a new civilization. When Cronin picks up the narrative again, Auntie is an ancient and her great-great nephew, Peter Jaxon -- a young man charged with maintaining the Watch (manning the compound's battlements and looking for any sign of the virals) -- becomes the central character.

Like Project NOAH and Amy's life during the Time Before, Cronin renders existence in the Colony with exquisite detail. The new cast of characters (including Peter's troubled brother Theo and Lish, the militaristic orphan who mans the battlements with Peter and who may or may not be in love with him) come roaring to life. We grow comfortable in the First Colony, start feeling at home there with the many Jaxons, Fischers, Patels and Chous, and when things inevitably come apart at the seams (precipitated by Amy's mysterious arrival and a plague of nightmares that may not just be dreams) we feel the tragedy of the Colony’s undoing as acutely as we do the collapse of our own world. When Peter, Lish and others hit the road with Amy for the arduous journey to Colorado, we can feel their loss of the only home they ever knew.

It's during this journey -- in the final third of the book – where Cronin begins to struggle with the material. His prose becomes ever so slightly more overwrought, and he resorts more and more to "fate" (less charitably "coincidence," and even less so "narrative convenience") to propel the story forward. When our characters find themselves in an apparent haven (actually called "The Haven") of survivors in southern Nevada, Cronin overplays his hand a little, telegraphing too soon the truth of this place that seems too good to be true, thereby sapping the power from the final revelation of what The Haven is all about. It was only in these pages that I began to grow impatient with the story.

But he recovers nicely. As the characters move into Colorado, he throws some unexpected curveballs and delivers a powerful climax before giving us an open-ended conclusion that manages to be heartfelt without sinking too deeply into the saccharine.

He then delivers a sucker punch on the last page that will literally take your breath away. Thank God this is supposed to be the first in a series, because I'm almost literally dying to know what happens next.

Cronin has been widely praised (most notably by King himself) for putting the scare back into the vampire story. But this isn't really his goal. Parts of the book are inarguably very frightening, and Cronin displays a Hitchcockian knack for building suspense. But the overarching tone of the book is one of deep, aching sadness (I'd suggest listening to, as I did, The National's High Violet while you read it. If there has ever been a better marriage between album and novel, I don't know what it is). The virals themselves barely resemble vampires as we know them, and Cronin impressively balances the terror at what they are and what they can do with the tragedy of who they were.

As someone who still daydreams about someday writing the perfect horror novel, it would be easy to resent Cronin for this book. Here's this literary douchebag who wandered into MY genre after goofing around with his daughter and managed to write perhaps the best horror novel in two decades. And he makes it look pretty damn easy.

Asshole.

But in the end I'm grateful for this book. If you're a horror fan -- or just a fan of good writing that can sweep you away -- you will be too.